How Many Pi Coins Are There in Circulation?

Pi Network, a crypto project you use on your phone, wants to get tons of people into cryptocurrency, and they’ve capped their total Pi coins at 100 billion. This huge number, which you can read about in their whitepaper and official updates, is the backbone of how their whole coin system works, affecting everything from how people earn coins to how the project plans to grow.

The whole money plan for Pi Network revolves around that 100 billion coin limit, and they have a specific way they’re splitting them up to help the community get bigger and make the network useful. Here’s the breakdown of who gets what:

• Community Mining Rewards (65 billion Pi – 65%): Most of the coins, a hefty 65 billion, are set aside for “Pioneers”—these are the folks using the app to mine on their phones, bringing in new people, and down the line, helping run the network’s nodes. This chunk covers all the Pi people mined before the Mainnet went live and any they’ll mine after.
• Pi Core Team (20 billion Pi – 20%): The original creators get 20 billion Pi to keep the project running, fix things, and fund new ideas they come up with.
• Foundation Reserves / Ecosystem Development (10 billion Pi – 10%): Ten billion Pi are put away for a future Pi Foundation that’ll handle things like community projects, money for developers making apps on Pi, and other stuff to make the Pi world better.
• Liquidity Pool (5 billion Pi – 5%): And the last 5 billion Pi are meant to make sure there’s enough Pi floating around for smooth trading when the network opens up to everyone and connects with crypto exchanges.

Something important to get: even though all 100 billion Pi coins were sort of created when the Mainnet started, the actual amount people can use at any moment—the “Effective Total Supply”—grows as more users move their mined coins over to the Mainnet. The coins for the Core Team, the foundation, and for trading liquidity get released gradually, matching how quickly the community moves their own rewards, so the overall percentages stay balanced as the usable supply changes.

How you “mine” Pi is totally different from old-school methods like Bitcoin’s energy-guzzling Proof-of-Work. Pi put phones first, using something called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), so you can earn Pi just by tapping a button in the app each day without draining your battery.

The way they hand out these mining rewards gets stingier over time, following a pattern they call a declining exponential decay model, which is all laid out in their main document. Basically, the standard amount of Pi you can mine tends to drop as the network gets more crowded and as the monthly pot of reward coins shrinks. Think of it like Bitcoin’s “halvings”—Pi also cuts the mining rate when they hit big user numbers (like 100,000 people, then a million, then ten million) to keep the coin from becoming too common. At some point, you won’t be able to mine new Pi anymore, either when a billion people are on the network or when that big 65 billion coin stash for community mining runs out.

You can boost how much Pi you mine by helping keep the network safe with “Security Circles” (basically, small groups of people you trust) and by getting new folks to sign up.

Figuring out exactly how much Pi Coin is actually “circulating” has been tricky, particularly while it was in its “Enclosed Mainnet” stage when you couldn’t just trade it on exchanges. Different websites showed different numbers, with guesses in early 2025 putting the amount anywhere from about 7 billion to almost 12.7 billion Pi.

A Pi coin goes through a few steps before you can actually use it on the Mainnet after you first mine it:

• Mobile Balance/Unverified Balance: This is everything you’ve mined on the app, even bonus Pi you got from people you invited or from your Security Circle buddies if they haven’t done their ID check (KYC) yet. You can’t move this Pi to the Mainnet just yet.
• Transferable Balance: This chunk of your mined Pi is the stuff you can shift over to the Mainnet. It’s mostly the Pi you mined yourself (once you’ve passed your ID check) plus any bonuses from friends in your network who’ve also done their KYC.
• Mainnet Balance: After you finish the KYC process and tick off all the items on the Mainnet migration list, your Transferable Balance zips over to your Pi Wallet, which is on the actual, live Mainnet. This Mainnet money is then split into two types:

1. Available Balance: This is the Pi you can use right away for stuff inside the Pi world.

2. Locked-up Balance: You can choose to lock away some of your migrated Pi for a while (anywhere from 2 weeks up to 3 years), and if you do, you get to mine Pi at a faster rate. The idea behind this is to keep the network steadier and stop too many people from selling their Pi all at once. Word from early 2025 was that a lot of the Pi moved to Mainnet was actually locked up, with tons of people choosing the three-year option.

Making everyone do KYC (that ID check) is super important; it’s like a bouncer making sure only Pi from real, verified people gets onto the Mainnet, kicking out any coins from fake bot accounts or people with multiple accounts. Any Pi from accounts that don’t pass KYC, or just don’t bother verifying by certain dates, might get taken out of the total amount of Pi available, maybe by “burning” it (deleting it) or giving it to someone else.

The way Pi Coin works has things that could make its value go down (inflation) and things that could make it go up (deflation):

• Early on, more inflation: When people mine new coins and move them to the Mainnet, there’s more Pi around, which can push its value down a bit.
• But it also has ways to fight inflation:
  • Slower Mining: Every so often, they cut how fast you can mine new coins, so fewer new ones are made.
  • Hard Cap: There will only ever be 100 billion coins, so the supply can’t just keep growing forever.
  • Transaction Fees Gone: When you make transactions on the Pi network, the fees paid are apparently taken out of the system for good (they call this “burning”), which shrinks the total amount of Pi. By early March 2025, people were saying that over half a million Pi had already been burned up this way.
  • Lost Pi: If people fail their ID checks or just leave their accounts dormant, that Pi might also get burned or given to someone else, tightening the supply even more.
  • Locked-Up Coins: Even though locking up your Pi isn’t permanent like burning, it takes those coins out of play for a while, which definitely affects how much Pi is available in the short term.

Moving from the closed-off Enclosed Mainnet to the Open Mainnet, which was said to be happening around February 20, 2025, is a really big deal for Pi. Once this happens, Pi can connect to the outside world, meaning it can show up on crypto exchanges, and the wider market will start deciding its price. Before they could flip that switch, they needed a lot of people to pass their ID checks (reports in early 2025 said over 12 to 19 million had), a good chunk of coins moved to the Mainnet, and a lively ecosystem with at least 100 useful apps running on Pi.

Pi Network has definitely stirred up some trouble and faced its fair share of arguments. Some folks in the community and a few analysts have raised eyebrows about how open Pi is with its coin numbers, especially when it comes to the real-time count of circulating coins and how the team and foundation tokens are handled. People have also pointed out that a whole lot of Pi seems to be sitting in just a handful of wallets, possibly belonging to the Core Team or the foundation, which makes you wonder how decentralized the project really is.

Outside experts looking at Pi have frequently mentioned that the project’s main tech hasn’t been checked over by independent security auditors. Big names in crypto, like Justin Bons from CyberCapital and Bybit’s CEO Ben Zhou, have openly slammed Pi, worried that it’s too centralized, might have copied its tech, and could be making promises it can’t keep. There’s also talk that regulators, especially in Vietnam, are taking a closer look at Pi.

Even with all this flak, the Pi Core Team insists their coin system and step-by-step launch are all about being fair, secure, and building an ecosystem full of useful stuff that will last. In the end, whether Pi Coin becomes valuable and successful really boils down to if lots of people start using it, how good its app world turns out to be, and if it can handle the tough ride of the open crypto market.